Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

Language, Education and (violations of) Human Rights

Geneva, 24 April 2008

Abstract

The education of Indigenous and minority children in most countries today violates the right to education (Magga et al., 2005). It can sociologically and educationally be termed genocide, according to the UN Genocide Convention; legally, it can be seen as a crime against humanity (Dunbar & Skutnabb-Kangas, 2008).

The maintenance of diversity is counteracted by the increasing dominance of English (Phillipson 2008) and other killer languages. These are often learned subtractively, at the cost of the mother tongues (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000), instead of additively, in addition to mother tongues. Schools participate, through assimilationist genocidal education, in processes of linguistic capital dispossession (Harvey 2005, Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, in press), and reproduction of poverty (Sen 1985, Misra & Mohanty 2000, Mohanty 2000, Mohanty & Minati 2007).

The most important Linguistic Human Right (LHR) in education for Indigenous peoples and minorities, if they want to reproduce themselves as peoples/minorities, is an unconditional right to mainly mother tongue medium education in non-fee state schools. This education (of course including teaching of a dominant language as a subject, by bilingual teachers) should continue minimally 8 years, preferably longer (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, fin press a, b, Skutnabb-Kangas, Phillipson, Panda & Mohanty 2009; Heugh, 2009, Skutnabb-Kangas & Heugh, forthcoming).

Today, binding educational LHRs are more or less non-existent. According to pessimistic but realistic estimates, 90-95% of today's spoken languages may be very seriously endangered or extinct by the year 2100 (Krauss, Maffi & Yamamoto 2004). If this scenario is not counteracted strongly and immediately, the estimate could also be that most languages to go would be Indigenous, and most of the world's Indigenous languages would no longer be learned by children in 2100 or be completely extinct. Since much of the knowledge about how to maintain the world's biodiversity is encoded in the small Indigenous and local languages, with the disappearance of the languages this knowledge (which is often more accurate and sophisticated than "western" "scientific" knowledge, see ICSU 2002) will also disappear; this means destroying the prerequisites for human life on earth.

Dunbar, Robert & Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (2008). Forms of Education of Indigenous Children as Crimes Against Humanity? Expert paper written for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII). New York: PFII. [In PFII's system: "Presented by Lars-Anders Baer, in collaboration with Robert Dunbar, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Ole Henrik Magga"]

Harvey, David (2005). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.